It’s a novel fast-breeder reactor design in which decades or centuries worth of fertile fuel is loaded into the reactor core one time only (at construction), and it is bred in-place into fissile fuel, which is subsequently burned in a wavefront that propagates through the nuclear “log” over time, leaving behind highly radioactive (but short lived) fission product waste, and ultimately extracting virtually all of the available nuclear energy from the initial fuel (vs. the ~1% that we get now in the US) without expensive and proliferation-prone re-processing, and without the error-prone process of re-fueling. Ideally, the reactor could be built deep underground, and the containment vessel would also serve as the disposal container. Because of the relatively short lifetime of the waste products (decades-to-centuries, not millennia-to-eons), this is actually technically plausible. Because of the in-ground set it and forget it construction, it’s (more) plausible that political stability only at the time of construction (vs. over the centuries following construction) would be sufficient to ensure safe operation for the lifetime of the reactor.

However, this power source still has the very significant drawback that there’s no way we’re going to be installing tens of terawatts of it (no matter how good the design is) for at least 20+ years, and in the meantime, we’re going to continue emitting a serious amount of CO2, which is unacceptable.

Additionally, much though we like to pretend it isn’t possible, we, and any number of other great nations are entirely capable of descending into chaos. In the fullness of time there is nothing that fundamentally rules out another Chinese civil war. Or another Russian civil war. Or a second Mexican revolution. Or another American civil war. In such a situation a desert valley filled with solar panels or mirrors, or a continental shelf carpeted with offshore wind turbines does not become the same kind of liability that a nuclear power stations does.

We are not in control. Nobody ever really runs the show for long.

Thank you for the information Zane. I read it, but I don’t agree. There hasn’t been a nuclear accident in this country since 1979, no one died, and Chernobyl was a third world country’s incompetence. I don’t agree about the costs at all, but, full disclosure, my husband is a nuclear engineer. Our planet is very important but it is not necessary to destroy our standard of living to rush into something so we can be the lead nation when no one is following as the recent G-8 summit demonstrated. The climate bill is so botched by special interests, I find it to be a mess as I read it.